81–90 of 119 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative seems to be importing a lot of food that has been grown in countries that might care even less about the environment.
No, the alternative is changing agriculture, regulating it and helping it be more environmentally friendly, and not alleviating environment taxes on fuel and water. Tax pesticides, too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Go talk to Venezuela about competitive advantage. They purposefully neglected their native food production in favour of food imports from abroad. Now they cannot source enough USD to import enough food and they are fucked. Food is a national security issue. You cannot become dependent on other countries.
Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries. Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics. If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national…
The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming.
Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting large "strictly for profit" farms into distinct units would have many benefits ecologically and possibly even help revitalise the rural towns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Food's certainly a national security issue, but this has almost zero relevance to the French farming subsidies being discussed here, or similar subsidies in most other countries. Those subsidies are just enacted to serve entrenched farming interests, usually because rural voters have a disproportionate say in national politics. If a country was designing a food subsidies policy that was truly concerned about national…
You're mischaracterising the issue. Cheese isn't the issue at hand. Caloric efficiencies are a valid point, but here the greater harm is done by the huge thirsty corn fields that encompass the horizon. The question as I understand it is whether the surplus production/exports are worth not scaling slightly back on the extensive farming. Either diversifying production, letting a part of the area to fallow or splitting…
You'd instead at the very least just have them drink the milk directly, but more efficiently either consume the corn the cows are eating, or grow something in the grass fields the cows are using that people could eat directly.
Then there's the unrelated question of whether these subsidies aren't causing a net harm on the environment in France. I don't know about that, I'm just pointing out that the argument for agricultural subsidies due to national security concerns doesn't hold up if it's being used to defend anything resembling current subsidies.
That's before we even get to discussing how implausible that argument is to begin with. OK, maybe France and other EU countries would need to strategically make sure they don't become reliant on the likes of China, Russia etc. for food imports.
But it makes no sense these days that France would need to be concerned that they couldn't just largely import food from Spain and Italy, who have onerous EU-imposed production quotas due to French agricultural lobbying, even though it's more efficient to produce the food there in many cases.
What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the…
There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.
What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the…
If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate? There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate? There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.
"horrible" is going a bit too far? It is 20% higher than average. http://www.lepoint.fr/sante/en-france-les-agriculteurs-se-su...
I don't know of any studies to prove it is true, but I suspect that the US Midwest (in particular) has had a similar decline. Anecdotally I can say that there are certainly far fewer insects here than there were in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up, and also that there seem to be far fewer birds. I wonder if we'll stop dumping this stuff into the environment before it's too late. It would require a whole new way…
In Australian backyards, let alone the bush, the birdlife is varied and can be very noisy (magpies, lorikeets, cockatoos). At dawn in many areas of the bush here, the birds are hilariously loud - good luck sleeping in if you're camping!
What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the…
What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the…
If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate? There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.
There's no contradiction between the two? The suicide rate of farmers is a little above average, probably because, in spite of all the subsidies and advantages, they still have a very hard time making a living.
But farmers are still sacred in the sense that it's impossible to suggest that maybe the current state of affairs is suboptimal, or to have a serious public conversation about that policy.
What's so infuriating in France is that farmers are basically sacred: nothing can be said, let alone done, to curb their behavior. They benefit from all kinds of advantages: they don't pay taxes on fuel and don't pay for water (water in France is very expensive for everyone else except farmers), have all kinds of special conditions and fiscal deductions, and that's in addition to the direct payments they get from the…
If farmers are “sacred”, how do you explain their horrible suicide rate? There are a lot of problems with the french agro-food industry; but I wouldn't blame farmers alone.